e sheep, you merely raise the uncomfortable
suspicion that, after all, there must be something amiss with a
civilisation which counts you among its most expensive products."

But in the untroubled hour of prosperity this weakness of breeding is
scarcely less apparent. Our admired bloom is admired rather for not doing
certain things than for doing others. His precepts are cautious and
mainly negative. He does not get drunk (in public at any rate), and he
expends much time and energy in preventing men from getting drunk. But
he does not lead or heartily incite to noble actions, although at times--
when he has been badly frightened--he is ready to pay men handsomely to do
them. He wins and loses elections on questions of veto. He had rather
inculcate the passive than the active virtues. He prefers temperance and
restraint to energy and resolve. He thinks more of the organisation than
the practice of charity, esteems a penny saved as three halfpence gained,
had liefer detect an impostor than help a deserving man. He is apt to
label all generous emotions as hysterical, and in this he errs; for when a
man calls the generous emotions hysterical he usually means that he would
confuse them with hysterics if they happened to him.

Now the passive virtues--continence, frugality, and the like--are
desirable, but shade off into mere want of pluck; while the active
virtues--courage, charity, clemency, cheerfulness, helpfulness--are ever
those upon which the elect and noble souls in history have laid the
greater stress. I frankly detest Blank, M.P., because I believe him to be
a venal person, a colourable (and no doubt self-deceiving) imitation of
the type. But, supposing him to be the real thing, I still think that, if
you want a model for your son, you will do better with Sir Philip Sidney.
If ever a man illustrated the beauty of the active virtues in his life and
in his death, that man was Sidney; but he also gave utterance in noble
speech to his belief in them. In the _Apologie for Poetrie_ you will find
none of your art-for-art's-sake chatter: Sidney boldly takes the line that
poetry helps men, and helps them not to well-being only, but to
well-doing, and again helps them to well-doing not merely by teaching
(as moral philosophy does) but by inciting. For an instance--

"Who readeth AEneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not
it were his fortune to perform so-excellent an act?"

There speaks